The Reluctant Doomsayer-05

I negotiated with the convention committee as to the appearance. I explained to them my concerns, and they did demonstrate that they understood, so they agreed to a tele-presence appearance over Skype- especially after I explained the cost-savings that they would have by going with my plan.

The resulting appearance, with no face camera and a subtly-modulated voice to disguise my identity, worked well. I had my end ready; documents and source materials in the cloud, ready for download and place where the traffic could handle it, as well as a slideshow presentation. The convention and I agreed to billing this as a live podcast, which brought out a sizeable audience, and convention materials did get the URLs for my supplementary materials out on time. Everything got set up for a good showing.

Everything went fine until I finished the presentation and opened for questions. I prepared for a hostile questioning period, but this was a degree of hostility that I had no anticipated. I faced a combination of rigidly dogmatic Christians, and rigidly dogmatic atheists, neither of which were open to rational argumentation. I had to assume a position of amused mastery and take a paternal tone with them to keep my cool. Fortunately, my studies and memory proved to be time well spent; by the time that the appearance concluded, I exposed my critics as being ignorant and irrational in their opposition to my message.

I took that as a sign of things to come. While my metrics and analytics showed increased sales, traffic, and revenue from same I'd been made painfully aware that the traditional tribulations of a prophet remained. I kept that in mind when I received alerts as to posts made on social media and in the Blogosphere regarding my appearance. Now more offers appeared in my inboxes, email and others such as Skype, and I realized that I'd now crossed a threshold past which my relative anonymity no longer existed- now I had to be very vigilante as to my privacy.